Orthodox Christian dating in Indiana

Orthodox Christians in Indiana

Gary was built in 1906 and the Church arrived with the first shifts. The Romanians of the mills organized their parish on 11 October 1908 and served the first liturgy on Christmas Day; the cornerstone of their church at Hayes and 19th Streets was consecrated the next October. The Russians and Rusyns followed in 1911 with St Mary's at 17th Avenue and Fillmore Street, a parish that changed its name twice and, in December 1998, its city, and is now the Protection of the Virgin Mary on Grand Boulevard in Merrillville. The Romanians moved to Merrillville too, consecrating their present church in 1971. Hammond's Greeks organized St Demetrios in 1936; the Serbs of the Region consecrated St Elijah, now a cathedral, in 1964. Up the lakeshore in Michigan City, St George was founded in October 1910, and it was its priest, Fr Antonius Bohlin, who first drove down to Indianapolis to serve the Arabic-speaking families there when they had no church of their own.

Those families had been in Indianapolis since 1890, when a couple from Talia and Zahle opened a dry-goods store near downtown. They bought a clubhouse on North Davidson Street in 1919, filed the Knights of St George with the Secretary of State on 8 February 1925, met the young Archimandrite Antony Bashir on 6 January 1926, and in the same year built and consecrated St George on North Sherman Drive. The Greeks of the city had been setting up an altar every Sunday on the upper floor of 27 South Meridian since the 1890s; they asked Greece for a priest in 1905 and incorporated Holy Trinity on 29 January 1910. The Romanians of Indianapolis founded Sts Constantine and Elena the same year. For half a century those three, with Fort Wayne's St Nicholas, founded by Macedonians at the end of the Second World War, were central and northern Indiana's Orthodox Church.

The next chapter was written by people born Protestant. In 1975 a fellowship in Indianapolis, inspired by the Acts of the Apostles, began meeting in basements, living rooms, hotel rooms and a warehouse, moved into the same apartment complexes to live near one another, read the Church Fathers, watched most of its movement enter the Antiochian Archdiocese in 1988 and held back, and in 2001 asked the Orthodox Church in America to receive it; it is St John the Forerunner on Blaine Avenue now. In Bloomington a pan-Orthodox community that had been served by visiting clergy since 1959 became an Antiochian mission in 1989, a parish called All Saints in 1997 and, in 2001, the owner of twenty-four acres on South Fairfax Road. In Crawfordsville a community that had passed through several churches was received as St Stephen the First Martyr in 2001 and consecrated in 2011. Holy Trinity, meanwhile, bought land at 106th and Shelborne in Carmel in 1998, opened its Byzantine church there on Christmas Eve 2008 and was named a cathedral in 2018.

What the newest members look like has been measured. The Orthodox Studies Institute surveyed twenty parishes in six jurisdictions and fifteen states and reported of the converts received from 2013 on that two thirds were under forty at their reception, that people in their thirties outnumbered every other decade, and that 44 percent were single when they came in.

Indiana was not a line of its own in the report, but its subject is the person who will hand you a coffee at Blaine Avenue, Fairfax Road or Whitlock Avenue: raised Baptist or Methodist or nothing, received as an adult, not yet married. Three of the state's parishes were founded by exactly such people, and they are the ones you are likeliest to meet on the site this page belongs to.

Six jurisdictions cover the state. The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese has Holy Trinity Cathedral in Carmel, Holy Apostles in Indianapolis and Holy Trinity in Fort Wayne under the Metropolis of Detroit, and St Demetrios in Hammond, Sts Constantine and Helen in Merrillville, St George in Schererville, St Iakovos in Valparaiso and St Andrew in South Bend under the Metropolis of Chicago. The Orthodox Church in America's Diocese of the Midwest has St John the Forerunner in Indianapolis, St Stephen in Crawfordsville, the Protection of the Virgin Mary in Merrillville, St Thomas in Kokomo and St Elizabeth in Chesterton; its Romanian Episcopate has Sts Constantine and Elena in Indianapolis and the Descent of the Holy Ghost in Merrillville; its Bulgarian Diocese has St Nicholas in Fort Wayne. The Antiochian Archdiocese has St George in Fishers and All Saints in Bloomington, with missions in Lafayette, Terre Haute and Nashville, Indiana. The Serbian Orthodox Church's Diocese of New Gracanica and Midwestern America has St Elijah Cathedral and St Sava in Merrillville, St George in Schererville and in East Chicago, St Nicholas in Indianapolis, Sts Peter and Paul in South Bend and St Barnabas of Indiana in Muncie. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia has St George in Michigan City, the Holy Virgin Protection in Goshen and a mission in Fort Wayne. The directory of the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops has the rest.

Where the community gathers

Indiana's Church is arranged along I-65 and US-31: Indianapolis and its ring in the middle, the Calumet in the north-west corner, South Bend and Fort Wayne across the north, Bloomington to the south.

Distances that decide everything

The Orthodox year in Indiana

Dating across jurisdictions, and with converts

Twenty minutes of Indiana road separate the Greek cathedral on 106th Street from the Syrian St George on 116th, and forty separate both from the convert parish on Blaine Avenue; what separates their members is not distance but what each of them means by "I'm Orthodox". That is the gap the cana.love questionnaire is built to close, and it does so in four ways.

Meeting safely

• Send money to nobody you have not met face to face; on cana.love a request for money is a reason to report, and the one who asked is removed permanently.
• Meet the first time in a public place, with someone you trust told where, and keep the conversation on the site until moving it is your own idea.

Reviews, reports and appeals are described on the guidelines page.

Common questions